Articles 7.
7.1
Competition Part 2 - Heather Heying
“If—as I argue below—male dominance hierarchies have historically been maintained through overt means, and female dominance hierarchies have historically been maintained through covert means, then dropping us into a social stew together, in which males and females are explicitly pitted against each other in a quest for a single currency, to work together while pretending that we all understand and play by the same rules, is to invite discord at best, disaster at worst.…
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Covert competition can take on many forms. It ranges from coyness and consideration for the feelings of others; to gossip, innuendo, and off the record conversations; to secrecy and outright lies. If we accept the combination of theoretical reasons to predict that women will engage in more covert communication than men, and the empirical research that supports these predictions¹², then we are left with an awkward truth: women are likely to engage not just in more coyness and protection of other people’s feelings than are men, but also in more secrecy and lies¹³.
Finally, recognize that the most successful cryptic competition may well be hidden from everyone, players included. Deceit is often more effective when it begins at home, in the form of self-deception¹⁵. While the empirical evidence seems a bit weak so far, women may be particularly prone to self-deception, at least with regard to their degree of conformity to social and ethical norms¹⁶.
If this last is true, we have a perfect storm. Women
are more likely to settle differences covertly rather than overtly,
are more regularly assumed to be victims than perpetrators, and
may be particularly effective at self-deception.
Given all of this, I hypothesize that women are less likely than men to either recognize or acknowledge their own competitive behaviors as such. This is due to
competition having been framed in male terms,
covert competition itself being more easily hidden even from those engaging in it, and
covert competition being less successful when it is public, as its very existence is threatened with exposure¹⁷.
I loved playing Ultimate, and loved watching it. I never did enjoy watching all-male games, or playing all-female games, as much as I loved playing and watching coed games. Coed games brought out the best of both approaches. Coed games were faster paced than the sometimes ponderous all-female ones, but, compared to all-male games, more players generally got to touch the disk, their contributions adding to the game. Coed games were a richer mixture of short back-and-forth passes and long hucks down the field. In Ultimate Frisbee, men and women played a more interesting, and to me a more rewarding, game, when we played together. And that has been my experience in the rest of life, too.”
7.2
Our Politics and The English Language - Andrew Sullivan
“But I was most struck by the statement put out in response by a group called “The Institute for Antiracism in Medicine.” Here it is:
The podcast and associated promotional message are extremely problematic for minoritized members of our medical community. Racism was created with intention and must therefore be undone with intention. Structural racism has deeply permeated the field of medicine and must be actively dissolved through proper antiracist education and purposeful equitable policy creation. The delivery of messages suggesting that racism is non-existent and therefore non-problematic within the medical field is harmful to both our underrepresented minoritized physicians and the marginalized communities served in this country.
Consider the language for a moment. I don’t want to single out this group — they are merely representative of countless others, all engaged in the recitation of certain doctrines, and I just want an example. But I do want to say that this paragraph is effectively dead, drained of almost any meaning, nailed to the perch of pious pabulum. It is prose, in Orwell’s words, that “consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.”
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Part of the goal of this is political, of course. The more you repeat words like “proper antiracist education” or “systemic racism” or “racial inequity” or “lived experience” or “heteronormativity,” the more they become part of the landscape of words, designed to dull one’s curiosity about what on earth any of them can possible mean. A mass of ideological abstractions, in Orwell’s words, “falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.”
7.3
Coming of Age in a Brave New World - Heather Heying
“Modern college too often prescribes the walk that you take through ideas: maybe you get to take a year or two to declare your major, but you spend that time getting your other requirements out of the way, and then the major itself ever narrows your scope. Modern college thus has a tendency to canalize, in the language of genetics and neurobiology: it facilitates you taking a particular pathway, which then further deepens over time. Positive feedback and reinforcement make it ever harder to leave the path. The longer trod the path, the less likely you can even see over its sides, and be reminded that there is actually a great big world out there to be experienced⁶.
Similarly, college can be understood as a haphazard walk through a social world. The more elite the institution, the less haphazard the walk, the more prescribed by others from the start. But there are still choices to be made, and the possibility to engage with people who don’t remind you of yourself at all. You can come to know people in college who have not had your experiences, do not know your family, are from a different culture or ethnicity or religion or class—all of this is priceless. Perhaps you meet people who had fewer opportunities than you did, but are accomplished in cross country, or robotics, or chess, worlds about which you know nothing—but now you can learn. Or you may meet people who had more opportunities than you, but have a more difficult time than you in constructing careful arguments based on first principles rather than authority. And there is something to be learned there, too.
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“For it must be realized by any student of civilization that we pay heavily for our heterogeneous, rapidly changing civilisation; we pay in high proportions of crime and delinquency, we pay in the conflicts of youth, we pay in an ever-increasing number of neuroses, we pay in the lack of a coherent tradition without which the development of art is sadly handicapped. In such a list of prices, we must count our gains carefully, not to be discouraged. And chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilisations have recognized only one. Where other civilisations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilisation in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.” ”
7.4 ***
Why The Past 10 Years of American Life Have been Uniquely Stupid - Jonathan Haidt
“What would it have been like to live in Babel in the days after its destruction? In the Book of Genesis, we are told that the descendants of Noah built a great city in the land of Shinar. They built a tower “with its top in the heavens” to “make a name” for themselves. God was offended by the hubris of humanity and said:
Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.
The text does not say that God destroyed the tower, but in many popular renderings of the story he does, so let’s hold that dramatic image in our minds: people wandering amid the ruins, unable to communicate, condemned to mutual incomprehension.
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Babel is a metaphor for what some forms of social media have done to nearly all of the groups and institutions most important to the country’s future—and to us as a people. How did this happen? And what does it portend for American life?
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Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.
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But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.
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Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal solvent, breaking down bonds and weakening institutions everywhere it reached. He noted that distributed networks “can protest and overthrow, but never govern.” He described the nihilism of the many protest movements of 2011 that organized mostly online and that, like Occupy Wall Street, demanded the destruction of existing institutions without offering an alternative vision of the future or an organization that could bring it about.
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Second, the dart guns of social media give more power and voice to the political extremes while reducing the power and voice of the moderate majority. The “Hidden Tribes” study, by the pro-democracy group More in Common, surveyed 8,000 Americans in 2017 and 2018 and identified seven groups that shared beliefs and behaviors. The one furthest to the right, known as the “devoted conservatives,” comprised 6 percent of the U.S. population. The group furthest to the left, the “progressive activists,” comprised 8 percent of the population. The progressive activists were by far the most prolific group on social media: 70 percent had shared political content over the previous year. The devoted conservatives followed, at 56 percent.
These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and political attitudes. This uniformity of opinion, the study’s authors speculate, is likely a result of thought-policing on social media: “Those who express sympathy for the views of opposing groups may experience backlash from their own cohort.” In other words, political extremists don’t just shoot darts at their enemies; they spend a lot of their ammunition targeting dissenters or nuanced thinkers on their own team. In this way, social media makes a political system based on compromise grind to a halt.
Finally, by giving everyone a dart gun, social media deputizes everyone to administer justice with no due process. Platforms like Twitter devolve into the Wild West, with no accountability for vigilantes. A successful attack attracts a barrage of likes and follow-on strikes. Enhanced-virality platforms thereby facilitate massive collective punishment for small or imagined offenses, with real-world consequences, including innocent people losing their jobs and being shamed into suicide. When our public square is governed by mob dynamics unrestrained by due process, we don’t get justice and inclusion; we get a society that ignores context, proportionality, mercy, and truth.
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But this arrangement, Rauch notes, “is not self-maintaining; it relies on an array of sometimes delicate social settings and understandings, and those need to be understood, affirmed, and protected.” So what happens when an institution is not well maintained and internal disagreement ceases, either because its people have become ideologically uniform or because they have become afraid to dissent?
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Childhood has become more tightly circumscribed in recent generations––with less opportunity for free, unstructured play; less unsupervised time outside; more time online. Whatever else the effects of these shifts, they have likely impeded the development of abilities needed for effective self-governance for many young adults. Unsupervised free play is nature’s way of teaching young mammals the skills they’ll need as adults, which for humans include the ability to cooperate, make and enforce rules, compromise, adjudicate conflicts, and accept defeat. A brilliant 2015 essay by the economist Steven Horwitz argued that free play prepares children for the “art of association” that Alexis de Tocqueville said was the key to the vibrancy of American democracy; he also argued that its loss posed “a serious threat to liberal societies.” A generation prevented from learning these social skills, Horwitz warned, would habitually appeal to authorities to resolve disputes and would suffer from a “coarsening of social interaction” that would “create a world of more conflict and violence.”
7.5 ****
A Letter on Finding Your Purpose and Living a Meaningful Life - Hunter S. Thompson
And indeed, that IS the question: whether to float with the tide, or to swim for a goal. It is a choice we must all make consciously or unconsciously at one time in our lives. So few people understand this! Think of any decision you’ve ever made which had a bearing on your future: I may be wrong, but I don’t see how it could have been anything but a choice however indirect— between the two things I’ve mentioned: the floating or the swimming.
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The answer— and, in a sense, the tragedy of life— is that we seek to understand the goal and not the man. We set up a goal which demands of us certain things: and we do these things. We adjust to the demands of a concept which CANNOT be valid. When you were young, let us say that you wanted to be a fireman. I feel reasonably safe in saying that you no longer want to be a fireman. Why? Because your perspective has changed. It’s not the fireman who has changed, but you. Every man is the sum total of his reactions to experience. As your experiences differ and multiply, you become a different man, and hence your perspective changes. This goes on and on. Every reaction is a learning process; every significant experience alters your perspective.
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As I said, to put our faith in tangible goals would seem to be, at best, unwise. So we do not strive to be firemen, we do not strive to be bankers, nor policemen, nor doctors. WE STRIVE TO BE OURSELVES.
But don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mean that we can’t BE firemen, bankers, or doctors— but that we must make the goal conform to the individual, rather than make the individual conform to the goal. In every man, heredity and environment have combined to produce a creature of certain abilities and desires— including a deeply ingrained need to function in such a way that his life will be MEANINGFUL. A man has to BE something; he has to matter.
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As I see it then, the formula runs something like this: a man must choose a path which will let his ABILITIES function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of his DESIRES. In doing this, he is fulfilling a need (giving himself identity by functioning in a set pattern toward a set goal), he avoids frustrating his potential (choosing a path which puts no limit on his self-development), and he avoids the terror of seeing his goal wilt or lose its charm as he draws closer to it (rather than bending himself to meet the demands of that which he seeks, he has bent his goal to conform to his own abilities and desires).
In short, he has not dedicated his life to reaching a pre-defined goal, but he has rather chosen a way of life he KNOWS he will enjoy. The goal is absolutely secondary: it is the functioning toward the goal which is important. And it seems almost ridiculous to say that a man MUST function in a pattern of his own choosing; for to let another man define your own goals is to give up one of the most meaningful aspects of life— the definitive act of will which makes a man an individual.
7.6
Nobody Wants My Health Advice- Slowdown Farmstead
“ Before I was “diagnosed” with Lyme disease, I was told I had Lupus. Nope, they changed their mind, more likely MS. Nope, they thought better of it and came back with “autoimmune disease of unknown origin”. The specialists at the university hospital didn’t know what was going on, but they could see something fishy in my tests and recognised my symptoms as problematic. I was prescribed pills to dampen down the pain and inflammation. That’s what was on offer. And endless loop of pills and tests. I went another route. A route that took ten years of my life. There were times when the pain and exhaustion left me feeling hopeless, but what were my options? Today, I’m pretty darn healthy with enough pep to go about our physically demanding lives quite well, if I do say so myself. I thought I might share what I learned about going from sick to well over those challenging years.
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Whether we are talking about depression or autoimmune disease or any other ailment, I believe that all of these approaches help our bodies to regain strength and vitality. It may not rid you of disease, in fact it probably won’t, but without setting a healthy foundation, you will not find anything in a pill or a herbal concoction, or through any guru, that will bring you answers. I went that route at first. We had already been eating a solely organic, traditional foods diet for two decades when I got sick. From all outside measure, I was doing everything right. I felt pretty sad for myself in those early years of being sick. I was deeply frustrated. We were spending tens of thousands of dollars on specialists in Canada and the US, supplement regimens, antibiotic cycles that destroyed my gut, and alternative doctors and practitioners of every persuasion. Every new lead started off so hopeful and ended with disappointment. I remember thinking that if I could just find that one doctor, the right supplement, the answer would appear and I would be well again.
It didn’t work that way. What did happen is that over those years, I was forced to face my reality, nobody was coming to save me. Nobody had the ticket to the bus I wanted to ride. I had to do it myself and in order to do it myself, everything, and I literally mean EVERYTHING was up for review. I had to let go of all the stories I had been told, no matter how backed up by science they were. If it worked for others but didn’t work for me, it was gone. If it was the holy grail of wellness but caused me issues, it was gone. If a specialist directed me to do something that my body didn’t jive with, they were gone. Bit by bit, I started listening to my body over the gospel of the “healers”. It was tough at first, I had become so accustomed to respecting the intelligence of people outside of myself, but the more I did it, the better I started to feel. If I read that a certain food was good for me, I no longer accepted that as truth. Instead, I became the great observer and keen listener to my body. How do I tell someone that? How do I say, “You know, you should dump all of your doctors and start listening to your body.” It’s too wishy-washy and most people don’t even know what that means. “